Democracy Means Accepting Defeat (For You)

The main sound bite from the third presidential debate seems to be that Trump would not unequivocally accept the results of the election if he loses. In other words, Trump would reject the “peaceful transfer of power” so sacred to American democracy. At least, that’s what many observers are claiming. Trump, by refusing to say he would recognize a Clinton victory, is implying something “horrifying.”

Indeed, after his recent speech denouncing globalism, hostile elites, and media collusion with the Clinton campaign as threats to American sovereignty, it is hard to imagine Trump “accepting” the outcome. He has called for his opponent to be prosecuted should he win. He keeps calling the election rigged, and in a way he is right. The election is institutionally rigged. Let’s call it institutional racism.

Millions of Hart-Celler Americans are allowed to vote on whether we return to being a Eurocentric country or not. These post-1965 immigrants of color and their descendants, who have been both the majority of immigrants and the majority of population growth since the (((Hart-Celler Act))) was signed, get to decide our future. It would be like if a referendum had been held on, say, American independence from Britain, and soldiers and administrators of the British Empire in the colonies were allowed to vote on it.

That’s not the kind of rigging Trump is talking about though. He claims there will be widespread electoral fraud (which is unlikely looking at only past election trends, but this is an exceptional year). He more credibly claims that the media is working with the Clinton campaign against him to promote her and slander him (they are).

Rigged or not, Clinton is currently favored to win the election. For argument’s sake let’s assume a Clinton victory without widespread electoral fraud (not counting other forms of de facto rigging such as media gaslighting and propaganda, or that people of color are allowed to vote in a referendum on having a White majoritarian society). Why should the losers be required to accept this? What does acceptance even mean? For that matter, what does rejecting the outcome mean?

Here is the full question asked at the debate:

Mr. Trump, I want to ask you about one last question in this topic. You have been warning at rallies recently that this election is rigged and that Hillary Clinton is in the process of trying to steal it from you. Your running mate Governor Pence pledged on Sunday that he and you, his words, will absolutely accept the result of this election. Today your daughter Ivanka said the same thing. I want to ask you here on this stage tonight do, you make the same commitment that you will absolutely, sir, that you will absolutely accept the result of this election?

This was then followed up after Trump responded that he “will look at it at the time” and added that Clinton “shouldn’t be allowed to run,” with the following:

Sir, there is a tradition in this country, in fact one of the primes of this country is the peaceful transition of power. And that no matter how hard fought a campaign is, that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying that you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner. But that the loser concedes to the winner, and that the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?

Trump said “I’ll tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?” This is typical Trump, refusing to say the stock response. I think they knew he wouldn’t, and at this point are baiting him. They knew he wouldn’t say, “I am okay with being the loser.” The amount of pearl-clutching his non-committal is producing was surely anticipated. It perfectly feeds into a news-cycle about how “dangerous” and “unstable” Trump is. I can’t say how much that will hurt him, but his answer is a free pass for the media to manufacture another controversy.

And yet, for something so extremely important — whether or not the election ends in business as usual — the hostile elites refuse to admit what their concerns truly are. The question wasn’t what Trump would concretely do in the event of a loss, but whether he would “concede” and “accept the results.” If Clinton wins and Trump stays in politics, does that mean he rejected the results? They didn’t ask him if he would take it to the Supreme Court; they didn’t ask him if he would start a media empire to agitate against a Clinton administration; they didn’t ask him if he would spearhead an armed insurrection. All of those are forms of rejection, some more extreme than others obviously. They asked a very vague question, buttressed by platitudes about stable political transitions being what it means to have a democracy, and Trump gave them a very vague answer.

We know what the hostile elite and its press organs really want to ask. Will he start a civil war over the election? Will he incite violence? We know Clinton staffers do. And as a general rule, electoral violence usually comes from the incumbent against the challenger, since he controls the state’s organized instruments of violence. There’s much less risk involved in crushing the challenger than there is in trying to overthrow the government. And Trump is certainly not going to lead an insurrection at 70.

But these people won’t ask Trump if he’ll refuse to incite violence if he loses, because it makes them sound neurotic and insane. And they are neurotic and insane. That’s bad optics. When they aren’t foaming at the mouth about Trump being Literally Hitler™, they make vapid appeals to American civil religion and faith in democracy, neither of which they are particularly attached to. Wasn’t the Constitution written by evil White male racists? Isn’t democracy bad because it leads to populist upsets like Brexit and primary season Trump? Appealing to the Constitution and the idea of democracy makes for good optics though, even if one uses them cynically.

But back to the real question here: Why accept defeat? Committing to unconditionally surrender one’s political capital as a result of electoral defeat is one of the root causes of our decline as a civilization. It’s the principle of being unprincipled — the idea that the loser should give up and try again next cycle while the winner gets to strengthen his lock on the government. The democratic process, for the loser, is about ceding the Overton window. Accepting defeat is also a principle that’s only followed tactically. The left never agrees to give up its ideological planks if they lose at the ballot box. If they had, we wouldn’t have gotten to this point. But here they are, telling the right to yield if things go poorly.

Meanwhile, it’s not hard to imagine how much “civil disobedience” and how many “peaceful protests” there would be after a Trump victory. Will Clinton rein her supporters in and tell them to accept the results? Yet the prospect of Trump so much as grumbling about being defeated triggers a tsunami of shvitzing among the chattering classes.

2016 is an existentialelection, so there is zealotry on both sides. There is no recognizable United States of America without a border, and one candidate wants a border while the other does not. There is no demographic majority without immigration restriction, and one candidate wants this while the other does not. These are fundamentally different visions of what it even means to have a country. This election isn’t about tweaking the budget, setting up new social programs, or changing the tax code. It’s not about Aleppo and Mosul. It’s about the future of the United States. It’s about whether or not Washington will enfranchise at least 11 million illegal aliens so they can vote left and let in millions more settlers from the global south over the next four to eight years. That is the issue at stake here. Everything else is secondary, tertiary even.

So here we are, with the press sycophants of the Judeo-Saxon elite demanding that the nationalist accept a globalist victory before the ballots are even counted. It’s the right thing to do. Peaceful surrender to existential threats is the right thing to do. It’s the American thing to do. It’s what our republic stands for. It’s what makes our democracy safe and secure. Will you accept the continued plantation of America with non-Europeans, both legally and illegally, if that is what wins by plebiscite?

I’ll bite, no.

We do not accept your program of grand replacement.

We will never accept it.

We will never consent to it.

We will reverse it.

Your semantics will not work on us. No acceptance. No concession. A Clinton victory has zero ideological authority over what we believe in. We will not yield the moral high ground to a band of mercenaries and traitors. We will not abandon our commitment to national rebirth. And we will not be baiting into initiating disaster. Your eagerness to paint rust belt peasants and tech savvy shitposters as the violent unstable ones betrays your own doom desire.

Hail Victory.

Author’s note: Hillary Clinton regularly enables negro violence and is a serial liar, ethno-masochistic xenophile, anti-white, misanthrope, and amnesty advocate who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Esoteric Kekists, 14.88 million members of an entire religion — from spreading dank memes.